October 2011 Entries

Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps – basically some examples of some bad practices going on in mobile development. It’s interesting thinking of what a huge abstraction layer a mobile app is – no visibility of little green padlocks, no idea how your credentials are being stored or transmitted, it’s all hidden by a load of shiny icons and images. The author makes the obvious point that this isn’t an iOS only issue, it’s just he picked on iOS due to owning an iPhone. I’d imagine if you were trying to track what your Android...

A few Dropbox related things I’ve read over the past few days: Dropbox: The Inside Story Of Tech's Hottest Startup – an interesting light read on Dropbox. How Dropbox will die – not sure I agree with this, feeling the need to turn something like Dropbox (that does “one thing well”) into an application is a great way to promote unnecessary bloat. Dropbox API – newly launched Dropbox API for mobile and web apps – go forth and built fun stuff. Get it here if you don’t want to read the blog post. A thought around...

Understanding JavaScript Function Invocation and “this” aims to clear up some of the misunderstanding around the semantics of ‘this’ in JavaScript function invocations. If you use jQuery, then you should read the three paragraphs titled ‘On jQuery’, even if you don’t read anything else on the page: Because jQuery makes such heavy use of anonymous callback functions, it uses the call method internally to set the this value of those callbacks to a more useful value. For instance, instead of receiving window as this in all event handlers (as you would without special intervention), jQuery...

This Mobile Frameworks Comparison Chart is currently in development, but it’s a quick and useful way to compare a large number of frameworks before starting on a project to find the one that’s most suited to your needs. Allowing you to select the platforms you’d like to support is obvious, but the chart goes deeper than that, allowing you to specify things such as which hardware features you need (i.e. Accelerometer, Camera, etc.), what languages you’d like to use, and even what sort of license you’re looking for. Tags: Web Development, iPhone, iPad

I wrote about jQuery wildcard selector syntax briefly back in 2009, and since then that post has received a lot of views – way more than a post that brief should ever have seen. After seeing the number of views I did a quick bit of digging, and realised why I was having trouble back then, and possibly why the post has been viewed so often – it seems jQuery 1.3.2 dropped support for inline selector wildcards (i.e. \\S*), and there’s still posts, samples and examples lurking around encouraging people to use this old syntax. What this...

I’m finding my usage of Google+ interesting – there’s so many things I like about Google+, and yet I really don’t use it very often. I think one of the reasons for this is that currently some of the sharing and API options feel a little lacking. In short, I want to share content to Google+ from multiple sources (my blogs, other blogs, Google Reader, Twitter, wherever) without using extensions or Greasemonkey or any third party apps. Here’s the best of what I’ve found so far – if there’s any you know of that I’ve missed please let me...

A Pre-commit Checklist – if you’re working with a lot of junior or offshore developers, or are finding a lot of bad check-ins then this might be a useful thing to pass onto them. Worryingly “Does it compile” is something many people will laugh at without realising how commonly that’s not the case. If you’re working in an environment with unit tests, “do the unit tests *still* pass?” should also be added to the list.

Facebook and privacy concerns have gone hand in hand since it became popular. However some of their recent features are making a lot of people want to quit their Friendbooking altogether. I’m not a big fan of Friendbook in general, however I do like to keep in touch with some of the people I’m friends with on there (unlike some, my friends list is well under 150 people, and most of them are actual… friends!) which makes quitting it altogether something I’d rather not do. There’s other reasons why you might not want to quit Facebook – the inability...

I mentioned jQuery mobile beta 3 was released a few weeks ago, so it’d be a bit slack of me if I didn’t mention that 1.0 RC1 was released a few days back. I’ve not gone through the changes and fixes in too much detail, but the one thing that jumped out at me was that a download builder is something that will be very handy. Tags: jQuery Mobile, JavaScript

About me

My name is Ross Hawkins and I'm a developer, consultant, business owner and writer based in Auckland,
New Zealand. My current work revolves around ASP.NET, C#, Azure, jQuery, Ajax,
SQL Server, and a mix of other Microsoft development technologies. I also have about 15 years of experience with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and associated technologies.

One of the breaking changes which was made with
the 1.0 release of the Microsoft Ajax Extensions was the renaming
of the 'Debug' class to 'Sys.Debug' for reasons of compatiability
with other frameworks. Breaking changes like this can often be a source of frustration..

A textbox character counter is a pretty simple piece of functionality, and there's a lot of different ways to apply one to your application. The following method is nice and simple, and can be done using only clientside JavaScript if required, or combined with server side code in order to create a more dynamic effect